Network application and resource planning may measure a network's ability to serve users at an acceptable speed and with acceptable transaction success rates. The process may involve measuring the computing resources that may be necessary to support a particular number of users of a particular application. Among the constraints or conditions that may effect the performance of a network are bandwidth, latency, bandwidth utilization, packet loss rate, jitter rate, filtering, route changes, queuing, load balancing, packet modification, Quality of Service mechanisms, multi protocol label switching (MPLS), virtual LAN (VLAN), out-of-order packets, packet duplication, packet fragmentation, time to live (TTL) effects, link faults such as bit errors and disconnections, congestion and others.
Factors that may be considered for evaluating a performance of an application on a network may include a transaction response time (TRT) that a user may encounter when for example requesting a transfer of data from a server or the updating of data to a remote data base. A maximum permissible range for a TRT may be known as a service level objective (SLO). Other factors may be considered, and other measures of a performance of, for example a transaction of an application on a network, may be evaluated. One or more of such other factors may be assigned an SLO in evaluating the performance of a transaction over a network.
Prior network capacity systems, either analytical and/or discreet event simulation tools, model network conditions or constraints and may execute transactions of an application on such models. Modeling network constraints, characteristics or conditions is subject to inaccuracies and inconsistencies, and is heavily dependent on the integrity of the model being used.